I Hired my Former Intern to be my Lockdown Accountability Partner
Lockdown stinks. As an early-stage Founder, I was dealing with the regular COVID-19 related demands many businesses now face. I had just about had it when Singapore announced another month of lockdown isolation in May.
For real? I was at my wits end and no longer felt motivated to keep pushing at the pace I needed to.
That’s when I messaged my former Intern Travis my bizarre request.
“Travis, can I pay you to motivate me?"
Travis is a very organised, dutiful and hard-working freelancer I hired last year to help with copywriting and sales outreach. Travis and I have stayed in frequent contact since our collaboration. He regularly helps with copywriting tasks, SEO, sales and proof reading tasks. I’ve also coached and mentored him professionally on several occasions.
I explained to Travis that I needed someone in my life who would force me to sit down and finish all my tasks.
Surprisingly, Travis agreed to play along with my unique request. And it worked! Within just a few weeks, Travis had managed to get me back into action.
Here's how:
- We set up weekly catch-up calls to structure my to-do lists. Travis had access to all my Trello boards so he could regularly check my progress.
- Travis checked in on me daily to ask how I felt things were going. This was really the most effective method to get me back into gear.
- We also scheduled regular motivational chats to ensure I was feeling energised and allowing myself enough rest.
Working together with Travis to prepare the task list for the week ahead helped manage my workload. It also became apparent that I was trying to do too many things at once.
Another main reason this worked is that it can be pretty annoying to have someone check up on you all the time. In the end, this really pushes you to start becoming more intrinsically motivated so you can feel independent again.
I highly recommend hiring someone to be your accountability partner if you're feeling stuck or overwhelmed and need a way to find back your inner drive.
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About the Author:
Lisa Sorensen is the Founder and CEO of Zengage — a B2B SaaS platform that uses customer feedback data to grow sales for online retailers. Zengage analyses 1000s of customer reviews and data points and uses Machine Learning to deliver the optimal set to increase sales conversion rates. They then learn from every customer interaction and purchase decision to get better at driving growth.
You can email her at lisa@getzengage.com or connect with her on LinkedIn.
Zengage — getzengage.com — received pre-seed funding from Antler.
